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“My computer is slow!” – A case of slow add-ons.

End user computer performance is about perception. How fast does it “seem”?

Recently I looked at a corporate laptop, the user complained it was slow. I checked the usual culprits and nothing seems to be hogging the CPU. So I asked

“What do you mean by slow”

“Internet Explorer takes a long time to start up.”

!

Since Internet Explorer 9. the Manage Add-on feature monitors the load time of the installed add-ons.

In the above screen, you can see that the “Blog This in Windows Live” add-on takes 0.77 seconds to load. I disabled the “Blog This in Windows Live” add-on, the loading speed of Internet Explorer improved, and the customer was happy.